This is of course an incredibly accurate response on Alex's part.
As I have
written elsewhere, the progressive liberal values of enlightenment tend towards an emphasis on the use of education to remove bad thoughts and replace them with good ones. In other words, enlightenment horseshoes around to reactionary, fascist, mental hygiene. The right has its death camps (it attacks the body), the left its re-education camps (it attacks the mind). The atrocious synthesis of the two is the grade school turned famous Communist death camp in Cambodia known as Security Prison S21. It is this horseshoe that both leftist anti-psychiatry, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Laing, Szaz, etc., and right critics of 'the Cathedral' are responding to.
This is all a lot of words to say that considering Alex's point seems to reach beyond left/right lines, it seems to me to be worthy of serious contemplation, and that I agree with it.
Later,
in a related thread, Alex said something I did not agree with, but which still warrants contemplation:
"I don’t see how you can call yourself a materialist while advocating individualized corrective procedures for a material social problem."
This notion is captured in an meme unrelated to and found circulated before Alex's response:
It's a hard line to toe that 'mental illness is not a social problem,' or rather that the origin of mental illness is not solely social, or that fixing the social will alleviate or reduce mental illness, etc., because people on both sides of the debate have already made up their minds about the political implications and importance of their position in the debate.
This is to say that the debate is stale on both sides, and in both its form and content.
Content: the positions on either side of the discussion are unverifiable which lends itself to endless abstract theoretical bickering; Form: for many cultural reasons that would take too long to get into (and which all readers would likely find highly disagreeable), the deck is stacked in the social theorist's favor, not the individualist's.
More interestingly, even if there was a clear resolution, solution, or answer to the debate, it wouldn't matter. The debate is more about an 'ought' than an 'is' now anyways. The argument is that we ought to implement social reform to alleviate the actors in our society (hard to 'argue' against, isn't it?).
Furthermore, with notions such as the Xenofeminist's 'if nature is unjust, change nature' in play, so to speak, even if we could say for sure that the 'origin' of 'mental illness' is individual, the social theorists would propose social solutions; if reversed - we know for sure the origin of mental illness is social - individualists would propose an individual solution. Research on the 'nature/nurture' dichotomy (that I am too lazy to cite) seems to say the answer is not one or the other, but both. To add to the complexity, some social solutions will work where the origin is individual; some individual solutions will work where the origin is social; some social solutions will not work where the origin is social; some individual solutions will not work where the origin is individual. Some will work for both, and none, etc., and so on...
Summing up all these points - as Baudrillard writes in
Simulacra and Simulation (pg. 13):
“the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. That is, we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model...the models come first…The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model…is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalized cycle.”
That is, in the age of information overload, the same fact could be used to support contradictory claims. For a provocative example, 'X people commit more crime than Y' will be proof for camp A that X people need more education, proof for camp B that X people's crimes are over-reported but that perhaps they still
do commit more crime (or that it is over-reported and they do not commit more crime), proof for Camp C that crime is an abstract concept applied to people X in a way that is detrimental, proof for Camp D that X people are bad people, so on and so on; for a less provocative example, for leftists, slogans like 'there is no ethical consumption under capitalism' mean capitalism is bad and should be abolished; for rightists, it means that part of reality is accepting unethical acts, or that unethical acts are baked into the base existence of the world. Just like our Social/individual problem-solution matrix above, here, in the logic of simulation, facts do not correspond neatly to responses to the facts. Apodictive positivism (God's divine intent and its hermeneutic revelations recuperated in Lamarck's teleology) has given way to deterritorialized codes (Nietzsche's death of God and its hammer swinging creationism as mirrored in Darwin's random variation).
More important than this deterritorialization of information - and not to continually narcissistically reference myself - as I have written elsewhere (
Plutonics Journal, Volume XIII), good mental health treatment, i.e. psychoanalysis, is the leveraging of materially grounded cybernetic processes of informational deterritorialization for therapeutic gain, a process that can only happen in the realm of 'hyperreality.'
This sounds like a garbage trough of jargon that begs many questions, and it might be, but it gets us back to Alex's quote.
"I don’t see how you can call yourself a materialist while advocating individualized corrective procedures for a material social problem."
For me - and this could be very wrong - materialism is simply the idea that impersonal material forces and the dynamics between them (as opposed to abstract concepts such as spirit, soul, mind, etc.) determine and drive the every day happenings of our world. What is often called the 'critical trio' - Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx - were all materialists that correspond to some degree with this definition.
Nietzsche proposed a way of understanding the world wherein the body and its instincts, drives, and appetites are the significant forces or motivations for behavior and thought, and ultimately culture too. Freud develops a specific therapeutic practice directly out of Nietzsche, one which he uses a great deal of ink and energy justifying via physicalist concepts. In other words, for Freud (and Nietzsche), the 'mind' is not a soul, or spirit, its a contingent, accidental byproduct of deep, impersonal, material forces churning away below our consciousness, and because culture is in large a construction of rituals and rules conjured up in order to coexist as an organism in a fixed shared territory, the ethereal and abstract seeming aspects of society are merely the reflections of deeper instincts which have been sublimated and projected outwards. Marx certainly takes a different but not completely dissimilar approach, but it would be a waste of space to reiterate his work here (
you can see my writing on his alien materialism here).
Later, Deleuze and Guattari, who are reductively called Freudomarxists, synthesize these thinkers in what I again consider a materialist project. They state that there are bodies, and the incorporeal aspects of a body. Even language is treated as a diagrammatic force when they write that molecules crash into letters, and that proper names are forces as in physics (the Joan of Arch effect). This is of course recuperated later by the many accelerationisms that, regardless of their particular flavors, all seem to share a materialist grounding.
This all to say a few things;
1: psychoanalysis addresses the individual, but only because by limiting its scope (or rather, leaning into its limits) does it maximize its effectiveness. Psychoanalysts are trained to work intensively with individuals, and the method does not translate well outside of small group work. Pragmatically speaking, individuals are locally 'real' to an extent that I am not you, and we will never have the 'same' subjective experience or narrative history, even if those experiences are relatively uniform, and the histories largely fictional. Thus, when psychoanalysis addresses the individual, it addresses one real articulation of a multi-aspected reality, and, even though theorists such as De Landa and Land alike will make a good case for the 'individual' being a redundant operator to be replaced by assemblage theory, it is neither theoretically absurd, nor clinically improbable to claim that addressing an individual on an individual level may allow that individual to enact social change if so desired. As D and G implore us in
A Thousand Plateaus, one must retain small amounts of territory in order to deterritorialize (
see more here);
2: assuming 'the social' is the problem, for pragmatic reasons it may make sense to begin on a smaller, more local scale. One cannot easily 'change' the social alone, and the task of politically organizing in an effective manner is not without its challenges, challenges which are often intensified by interpersonal conflicts that, regardless of their origin, can be reduced with the help of competent therapists. This was in large part of Guattari's schizoanalytic project - how to understand group desire, and analyze the blockages that get in the way of cooperating with one another towards shared political goals;
3: perhaps what is most important - and most disagreeable to those who are not therapists like myself - is that psychoanalysis is materialist and not inconsistent with some significant aspects of other more 'traditional' materialist models.
In short, Freud's oeuvre is that an organism - which, to use D and G's language, is a captured or territorialized portion of impersonal, outside flows - has, like any animal, instincts. Instincts, being as they are partial captures of outside forces that seek re-connection with Outside geo-forces (thirst-water; hunger-food; sex-mate; kill-enemy, etc.), are not known in themselves but only in the form of their derivative, the drive. The drive is a state positioned between the pure bodily instinct (the Outside) and what we would think of as a wish, thought, or feeling (personal inside). These inexhaustible (at lest until death) drives constantly push for expression, but because of the unique situation of the human and its psychic organization - not social organization at this point - instincts are not always gratified and as a result, they are repressed (primal repression) which causes illness.
That is, its not the outside (lower case o) society that prevents the instinct or its derivative, the drive (capital Outside), from being expressed and gratified, but the psychic defense structure itself. The organism makes itself sick by taking its own finely tuned information processes too seriously! That is, states of intensities are felt to be dangerous, overwhelming, or overexciting to the young organism, and thus are repressed, projected, etc., for the organisms own safety (not unlike how some contemporary non-psychoanalytic scientific literature understands 'the mind' as a feedback arc of the body's systems being picked up in its own systems before being centralized in the brain, thereby making 'mental illness' a feedback arc of the mind [already a body derivative] caught in the mind's systems - i.e., a feedback cycle of a feedback cycle of a... As is pointed out in Moynihan's
Spinal Catastrophism, human intelligence was an evolutionary accident that has been selected for to the point of tragedy; consciousness is natures' mistake).
It is only later, when the infant has developed the cognitive and emotional capacity to more fully comprehend others and the world as separate from its washes of intensity, that the social system, with its taboos and rules, penetrates the psychic apparatus and install further repression. This is what psychoanalysts refer to as preoedipal and Oedipal development (of course, D and G argue compellingly that the socius is always already there, but this would take another blog post altogether...). Even at this point, it is important to note that early social rules (incest taboo) are the projections of deep psychic fears (even the social is itself the outcome of the body attempting to translate instincts into incorporeal states).
With this in mind, I want to return to the meme above of the demeaning, dominating therapist. If society - a current reality, despite whether its 'good' or 'bad' - is making one ill, its because one is not letting one's self experience the needed instinctual / drive response to the (hyper)real stimuli that is 'society.' This does in fact mean that one solution is for society to be changed to better give space to drive gratification however, to be able to change the outside (not Outside) to better be attuned with drive sanctification may require an understanding of the social system and one's own response to the social system, an understanding that can only be reached by becoming aware of one's wishes and reactions to the present reality as to not become so ill that one is not able to act effectively as one desires.
For psychoanalysis, there is a drive affirming response to all situations placed in front of the organism. There are surely situations that are more or less optimal to the survival or health of the organism, but the act of psychoanalysis is to help the person be able to respond with the most optimal behavior, thought, and feeling when any given stimuli - most of which are suboptimal to the organism - is presented to them. The dream with Communism or Socialism is that the society would be arranged in such a way that drive satisfaction would be more easily attained, and thus social ills would decrease. Until then, the pragmatic solution will be to figure out what one's drive affirming response to the current situation is, so that the current situation can be traversed, giving way to whatever comes next. In other words, if reality is going to push this society, despite its evils, onto us, how are we to respond as to maintain our sanity enough to develop our cleverness and change reality?
With all of this said, if the revolution arrived tomorrow, I'd gladly step down as a therapist and do something else, something less exhausting. Perhaps farming, building, and spending more time with my partner and dogs.
